March 16, 2018 - Weekly update

Overwinter testing & 1.1.0

This week, time was spent focused on diagnosing and reviewing the findings from a simulation of the Overwinter testnet activation to be better prepared for the testnet activation scheduled for early next week (block 207500 which targets Monday).

We also spent a lot of time looking at various issues to resolve for 1.1.0 including some improvements from upstream bitcoin. Relatedly, we took some time to review the overall process of pulling in changes from bitcoin for the newer engineers. One longtime goal getting a lot of attention is official build support for OSX. Other fixes we’re hoping to address include improvements and bug fixes for newly introduced RPC calls and support for raw transactions with shielded addresses so advanced users can create offline shielded transactions.

UX & Documentation

We’re continuing to progress on cleaning up our documentation and hope to have an initial version to show within the next week or two. This includes gathering docs scattered in various places like the website, github wikis and pulling in bitcoin documentation for the overlapping supported RPC calls.

Relatedly, we’re also progressing on website rebranding and content curation. There’s a lot of different types of people who seek information about Zcash so we’re hoping to revamp our website presentation so everyone can easily find what they’re looking for.

We also are planning an update to the UX guidelines for developers to include Zcash specific considerations especially with regards to the difference between shielded and transparent addresses.

Also, keep an eye out for a new project we’re looking to embark on with the community and UX feedback. There’s so many wallet options and other useful services in the Zcash ecosystem that we’re curious about what the community thinks of the user experiences and interfaces. This will also help to better inform our suggestions to developers in the ecosystem. We plan to announce our first “Ecosystem Spotlight” to the community in the next few weeks.

Hiring

We’re onboarding another engineer and a marketing director very soon!! Stay tuned for an announcement of the new crew to join the team.

Community and Industry Events

This weekend we’re sponsoring a student hackathon called Hack In The North which one of our engineers is attending to judge and mentor participants. If you know of other events that might be interesting for Zcash to participate in, definitely let us know. We’d love to see more ecosystem growth from regions all around the world!

We’re also participating in the MIT Bitcoin Expo this weekend!

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